Harold Evans Defends the English Language

Evans’s overriding dictum is that writers should get to the point and let most grammar rules be damned.

Photograph by Dominic Lipinski / AP

“English is being mangled!” the editor Harold Evans exclaimed over tea
and digestive biscuits at his home in Manhattan last month. The tea was
a reward for helping him with an urgent tech problem: his computer had
frozen, and he was in danger of losing an opinion piece due that night
to a London newspaper. “Just today alone, I’ve read three or four
instances of the word ‘advocate’ being used incorrectly!” Evans, at
eighty-eight, has published “Do I Make Myself Clear?: Why Writing Well Matters”—a polemic and style guide about our ever-growing need for
concise, understandable prose.

The book’s genesis was in Asia nearly five decades ago. “In 1959, I was
in a garden in India meeting with Pandit Nehru,” Evans said, before
taking his first sip of tea. “The International Press Institute sent me
to help modernize Indian newspapers. They were still stuck in the
Victorian reporting style. Nehru asked me what I could do to make them
more accessible to the masses. Out of that venture came ‘The Active
Newsroom’ ”—a dense manual that he grabs from a nearby shelf and flips
through quickly, pausing on pages depicting Indian newspaper layouts.
“Then Britain’s National Council for the Training of Journalists asked
if I would write a similar thing for England, which became ‘Editing and
Design [1973–1978]’.” He looks back at the shelf but decides against
weighing down the table with the five-volume series. “I was haunted,
though. I always wanted to write more about English—about how we might
make things clearer.”

“Do I Make Myself Clear?” focusses on the usual suspects tackled by
Strunk & White in “Elements of Style,” or—more important to Evans—George
Orwell: avoid the passive voice; eliminate redundancies; watch your
pronouns; don’t succumb to monologophobia (i.e., it’s usually fine to
repeat a word). Concision is a frequent refrain, and, in dozens of
examples, Evans details how to practice it. Why force the reader to
endure “adverse climatic conditions” when “bad weather” is all that’s
meant? “This is sadism of high order,” Evans, who was greatly influenced
by his first years in journalism working with the unforgiving metal
presses at the Manchester Evening News, asserted. “Your life was in
danger if you let text run too long, because it wouldn’t fit!”

Though ever serious about language, Evans’s humor separates his manual
from those by other writers. His own rules for writing evince his
playfulness: he proposes an “Evans’s Corollary” to Murphy’s Law
(“Anything that goes wrong will always be wordier than anything that
goes right”) and another to Gresham’s law of currency (“Bad words drive
out the good”). His lengthy glossary (“a fancy Latin word for a
collection of pet peeves”) of misused words is rife with humorous
asides—about ‘vice,’ he writes, “it would be a pity if it became a
synonym for sex.” Illustrating the difference between the passive and
active voices, he uses the sentence “A rhinoceros ran over Donald Trump
today” but admits that some might prefer a passive construction because
they care more about No. 45 (Evans’s preferred moniker for the President) than “a bad-tempered rhino.”

Of the many points in the three-hundred-plus-page book, Evans is most
proud of outlining the evils of what he calls “the predatory clause,”
which he defines as “an overweening prefatory element . . . [that]
steals the reader’s attention.” He learned that he was not alone. The
essayist Thomas de Quincy (1785–1859) wrote:

Each separate monster period is a vast arch, which, not receiving its
keystone, not being locked into self-supporting cohesion until you
nearly reach its close, imposes of necessity upon the unhappy reader
all the onus of its ponderous weight through the main process of its
construction.

The Victorian philosopher Herbert Spencer (1820–1903) also criticized
“the labyrinthine complexities” of his peers’ clotted prose. “I had
always admired [these two], but I didn’t know that, so many years ago,
they had the same thoughts as I do,” Evans said, giddily.

Evans’s overriding dictum is that writers should get to the point and
let most grammar rules be damned. “Just this afternoon, an accomplished
scientist neighbor of mine was telling me that she needed all the help
she could get with her grammar,” he said, cracking a smile. “I told her
just to write down what she means and move on!”

Evans’s no-nonsense desire for getting to the point may trace back to
his childhood during the Second World War. “Newsprint rationing in
wartime Britain enforced economy in language and a conciseness not
required in American print journalism, where acres of space invited
gentle grazing,” he writes. But this is not the conflict’s only
appearance here. Of the textual examples he analyzes, many concern war,
from a side-by-side comparison of the draft and final versions of
F.D.R.’s December 8, 1941, address to Congress; to the October, 2015,
targeting of the Kunduz Trauma Center, in Afghanistan, which killed
forty-two innocents, a blunder that was partly the result of unclear
language.

The prose throughout “Do I Make Myself Clear?” evokes the battlefield as
well. Evans abhors “the mental cruelty of millions of words of
regulations with legions of subordinate clauses fully loaded with
notwithstandings”; the digital era is “carpet-bombing us with the
bloated extravaganzas of marketing mumbo-jumbo”; the words issue and
problem are “invading barbarians . . . [running] through everywhere,
stealing space and laying waste to living images.” Though English is
already a bloody language (consider how many battles fill our days,
how we shoot for deadlines and pull the trigger on projects), the
book suggests that we are in a state of war—or at least on the brink of the
coup that Orwell feared when he wrote that “emptying words of meaning is
an essential step on the road to autocratic rule.”

Evans’s project aligns with the work of British philosopher J. L. Austin,
who argued that “words are our tools, and, as a minimum, we should use
clean tools: we should know what we mean and what we do not, and we must
forearm ourselves against the traps that language sets us.” But words
are not as tidy and solid as either would like. Persian, the only other
language that Evans references in the book, supplies a stellar counterpoint:
there is no gender-specific pronoun in the language, therefore turning
every amorous relationship ambiguously homosexual, heterosexual, and
bisexual. As Jacques Derrida and Sigmund Freud have both elucidated, the
slipperiness of language, whether English or Persian, is inescapable;
interpretation is never stable and always relational to a host of often
unconscious factors. All language is metaphor, and while using it, we
have an asymptotic relationship to presenting “the truth,” regardless of
how clear we want our prose.

But, as misplaced as Evans’s ardent faith in conveying truth in words may
be, its foundation rests in his commendable—and unwavering—service to
the reader. “The fog that envelops English is not just a question of
good taste, style, and aesthetics. It is a moral issue,” he writes in an
afterword. “Freedom is a moral issue. Life is a moral issue. Deceit is a
moral issue,” he said when pressed on this, his voice impassioned and
his fingers curled into a fist. “I’ve used the metaphor of fog because I
hate the fact that people are not allowed to see things which are to
their benefit but are obscured by language, whether for profit-mongering
or any other reason.”

Will our digital moment, with “Twitter’s guillotine falling at 140
characters,” introduce a new emphasis on concision? Evans has little
hope, as “Donald Trump, master of the medium . . . revealed how truth
had become a fugitive” on social media. “Maybe Twitter will grow up, but
I doubt it,” he lamented. “The impulse and attraction of the immediate
riposte, either offensive or complimentary, is so gratifying, I don’t
think it’s ever going to be a literary form.” But when I suggested the
idea of a serialized novel in tweets, his eyes brightened. “That’s like
how Dickens started,” he exclaimed, and immediately composed an opener:
“He was alive when they found him. It was a pity they had not arrived
earlier.” Before writing the second installment, he stopped himself and
told me that I should take up that challenge instead. “I don’t make any
claims to being able to be a good novelist,” he said. “What’s always
interested me are the actual facts.”